Over the last five or six years we've seen a tremendous shift in power from destination sites to search. Google has been the big winner. In general, newspaper websites have been slow to recognize the implications of this shift, and have adjusted poorly to the new realities.

In the last 24 months a new contender has arisen: social networking sites, which are so "sticky" that they're displacing everybody else, even Google. And again, newspaper sites are slow to recognize the implications.

How thin can a newspaper staff be? MediaNews is looking for an editor who may find out. Clyde Davis, who blogs about free newspapers, points to a job posting for Flash, a "daily commuter tabloid" planned for Salt Lake. The editor will supervise a staff of four.

In my book Andrew Keen is a pompous fraud and I wouldn't cross the street to put him out if he were on fire, so I particularly enjoyed seeing Markos Moulitsas expose Keen's sloppy "professionalism."

Moulitsas (aka Kos) quotes Keen's book...

In some ways a milestone is just a rock. In other ways it signifies the end of one thing and the beginning of something new. A couple of milestones this week:

As more news organizations unite their online and offline efforts, there's a potential for great confusion as print journalists encounter a whole new language.

Dana Eagles of the Poynter Institute and Danny Sanchez of the Orlando Sentinel ride to the rescue with Webspeak, a series of simple definitions. First up: Page views, sock puppetry, mashup, bread crumbs. I couldn't find an RSS feed, but then, if you need the definitions you probably aren't into RSS anyway.

Facebook isn't journalism. It doesn't even try. But like other conversational/participative media, it's brimming with opportunity for journalism, for community-building, and for commerce.

Facebook came from a university setting and precisely targets a poorly met need in the general area of community and communications.

So why was Facebook created not inside a college of communications, but rather by a computer programmer who briefly attended Harvard?

Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook is being interpreted (by the AP, among others) as placing a $15 billion value on the whole operation.

This is silly for a number of fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that Microsoft isn't trying to buy Facebook, but rather has other objectives in mind.

Anyone who has watched Microsoft for any amount of time knows the pattern: Partner, learn, copy, crush.